Visitor Badge Reloaded ✨

11/20/24: Refactoring to ~~Rust 🦀...~~Typescript

02/06/24: DEPRECATED vbr.wocr.tk (Freenom killed the domain... I renewed half a year ago btw). Please use the new domain name!

12/03/23: NOTICE - there sill be scheduled downtime between Dec 5th evening and Dec 7 morning due to server room maintainance ;)

7/19/23: Looking for new maintainers! If interested please submit a PR including "Maintainer" in the title.

6/20/23: VBR will be down for several days (shouldn't happen again). Sorry for the inconvenience :/

6/04/23: All cached records have been successfully restored!

6/03/23: VBR will be self-hosting Redis. Since CountAPI seem to be somewhat semi-permanantly broken, many existing badges have lost their count. However I was able to recover over 300k lines of logs, so I should be able to reconstruct a relatively accurate count of all the badges accesses within the past 3 months

5/28/23: It has come to my attention that countapi.xyz has gone down... It's quite unfortunate but it looks like I'll be implementing a new storage backend in the future. This will likely be part of a large rewrite of VBR. However, for the time being, data would be written to my own locally hosted Redis instance, then regularly backed up by myself. As for the lost data... we will have to live with the out-of-sync counts for the time being, I will work out a method to work out the count discrepancies in the future.

12/06/22: UPDATED HOSTING!!! Please use vbr.wocr.tk instead of the old Heroku domain (more details below)

Visitor Badge Reloaded is a project inspired by visitor-badge which is no longer maintained, unfortunately.

In addition, it was missing some features which made it feel incomplete to me. It was also written using Python which I'm personally not a huge fan of, especially when used as a REST api.

Hence, something of better performance and functionality must be made!

---

📊 VBR vs Visitor-Badge

	VBR	Visitor-Badge
Programming Language	Rust (Prev. Golang)	Python
Performance	Everything is self-contained (api, badges, kv)	Python + ... 🤔
Features	Many badges to customize. Basically all things customizable through Shields.io.	One size fits all approach.
Potential downtime?	Lol sus...	Vercel app sleeps?!? 😢
Self hosting friendly?	What'd you think...	No instructions in README.
Development?	Semi-frequent updates and refreshes. PRs and issues are regularly reviewed and addressed.	(Unmaintained?)

• direct replacement (refer to Migrating From Visitor Badge)
• (almost) fully customizable badge

🏎️ Benchmarks

coming soon... (At some point I promise...)

⚙️ Settings/Configuration

Defaults

• Colour: "blue"
• Style: "square"
• Text: "Visitors"
• Logo: no logo
• Cache: disabled
• Hit: enabled

Options (NEW Section)

To use the options, append these flags to the URL of the badge!

Option	Flag	Description
Colour	&color=<hex>	Changes the colour of the embedded logo on the right-side of the badge.
Label Colour	&lcolor=<hex>	Changes the colour of the embedded logo on the left-side of the badge.
Style	&style=<style>	Sets the badge style based on Sheild.io's option.
Text	&text=<format>	Allows a custom string format to be set. Replaces CNT with the view count.
Label	&label=<label>	Replaces the label with a custom one.
Logo	&logo=<logo name>	Adds a logo to the badge (refer to examples). Find the logo name from Simple Icons
Logo Colour	&lcolor=<hex>	Changes the colour of the embedded logo on the left-side of the badge.
cache (deprecated)	&cache=<anything here>	Disabled by default. Changes the caching behaviour of the count by setting a time out. This works very poorly with Github's Camo CDN if enabled (since Camo doesn't respect the expiry headers unless it's expired). If the flag &cache= is followed by any text (anything more than one character), caching is enabled.
hit	&hit=off	Enabled by default. Determines if the badge will update the count (useful for duplicated badges or badges for just viewing the count). If left empty, it will update the count on each view. Any setting that is non-empty (isn't true or yes) is considered disabled.

Coming soon: Support for (all) options in shields.io badges

Examples 🧪

Different text background

Different label background

Different style

Different text

Different logo

🚢 Migrating From Visitor Badge

TLDR; REPLACE THE DOMAIN NAME
ie. 'visitor-badge.glitch.me/badge?page_id=YOURPAGEID' --> 'https://vbr.nathanchung.dev/badge?page_id=YOURPAGEID'

Visitor Badge Reloaded has ALL the same features as the original Visitor Badge with EVEN MORE FEATURES!

This means that all you have to do is replace the url of the badge with https://vbr.nathanchung.dev/badge?page_id=<your own page_id here>. The total visits will remain the exact same as well!

Also, VBR features could be configured as a HTTP query parameter!

Options (Old Option) (add as a HTTP query parameter) 👀

IMPORTANT: Other than the page_id option, there exists additional styling options and functional options (in the future). More details about the options could be found at the bottom of the Shields.io website. Also, all the options are specified as HTTP parameters!!!

• page_id=<your id> --> identifies your badge, make this unique to yourself. eg. <your username.visitor.badge.reloaded or <username>-<username>
• color=<colour here> --> the hex colour of the text background, do NOT include the #
• lcolor=<colour here> --> the hex colour of the label background, do NOT include the #
• style=<style name> --> refer to the Sheilds.IO website for the available options
• text=<Some text other than "Visitors"> --> put a customizable label on your badge
• logo --> logo to put beside the badge, go to https://simpleicons.org/ for the available names
• logoColor --> refer to color for the formatting
• cache --> *just put &cache=on at the end of the badge url

🚀 Feature Roadmap

• Deployment

  • K8S support (Helm charts)
  • High availability (stateless)
  • Upgraded Shields.io
  • Automated scheduled backups: badge counts

• API Improvements

  • Rate limiting, Prevent Abuse
  • /health, /healthz endpoints
  • Improved /status information.
  • Uptime Monitoring

• Code base

  • Refactor code base
  • Complete TODO comments
  • Deprecate "Bigcache"

• New Website

  • [

  ] Personalized Analytics About Visitors

  • Automated import from other projects

🥳 Supporting this project!

I originally created this project because I personally wanted something that was built to my (relatively high) expectations of performance and customizability. I share this project and its hosted service to the public as I thought that this would be something that would benefit others. However, maintaining such a project and handling the demands of all the users that would use this service would incur additional work and costs for myself. Hence, it would be greatly appreciated if you could support this project by the following ways:

1. Star ⭐ and share this project!
2. Contribute to the development. Refer to Contributing
3. Bug tracking! If you find any issues, please create an Issue so the problem could be fixed as soon as possible.

📦 Deploying your own instance (self-hosting)

Please sauce PRs if there are problems ;)

Docker (V1)

This app could be packaged as a Docker image. Prebuilt docker images of VBR are also available on Docker Hub and on the Github Container Registry. Just run the relevant commands found in the Makefile. Then deploy to your choosen cloud service or even to your own server. However, note that there is no HTTPS support and VBR should be placed behind something else that provides HTTPS (eg. reverse proxy, Heroku...).

... (V2)

TBD...

Heroku (Deprecated)

NOTE: Untested for new versions of Heroku dynos. But feel free to submit a PR or issue/request if something doesn't work. Please note that Heroku will no longer offer free dynos starting November 28, 2022!

Documentation for deploying Docker is found here. All the files necessary to deploy to Heroku is already present within the repository so this should be rather trivial. In addition make deploy-heroku pushes the git repo to the heroku remote if you have configured Heroku already.

You could also deploy to heroku using this widget (thanks to rzlamrr for the PR):

💻 Software Used

V1

• Golang
• Docker
• Mux (router)
• Zerolog (logger)
• Redis (Cache and Database)
• shields.io

V2

TBD...